No matter what form it takes, all data is equal when it comes to security and compliance; it represents the lifeblood of an organization. Most organizations have a handle on structured data, but it’s the digital landfill of unstructured data that is posing issues. Read more »
Hardware sales, Fusion adoption (or lack thereof) are two key factors to explore when Oracle goes through its fourth quarter earnings next week. Read more »
Decision time looms. And as painful as it seems, right now it feels like the only responsible response to the PRISM scandal would be to stop using American web services for any private communications. Read more »
A startup called Spinnakr is launching to simplify the process of monitoring traffic, brainstorming actions to take and tweaking websites to give visitors what they’re looking for. Read more »
If a piece of information has been collected but has never actually been seen by the human eye, is it considered surveillance? Read more »
The European Commission knew about PRISM. And, while it may want to firm up data protection rules, it’s up to individual EU governments to decide whether they’re OK with the U.S. spying on their citizens. Read more »
Updated: The deal U.S. citizens struck after 9/11 exchanging privacy for security should be up for renewal or at least subject to debate, says former Microsoft top tech guru Ray Ozzie. Read more »
The man who leaked top-secret documents from the NSA — about a digital surveillance program called PRISM that collected data from Google, Yahoo, Facebook and others — has come forward to speak about why he did it. Read more »
A handful of companies are putting the final touches on products that bring big data to sports. The hard part is not the development of the technology but the lack of good business models. Read more »
There’s much debate still to be had over the NSA’s recently uncovered data-collection practices, but some of the technologies underlying them are out in the open. Here’s what we know already. Read more »
The past few days have seen a blizzard of leaks about surveillance activity by the government’s ultra-secret NSA arm, including data collection from phone companies and internet giants. Here is what you need to know about this developing story. Read more »
Whether these top tier tech vendors were complicit or dupes in government spying on people’s data, this news does nothing to help their credibility. Read more »
After it emerged that the U.S. National Security Agency is apparently tapping into the Google and Facebook communications of people around the world, EU data protection officials and activists have started asking questions. Read more »
The revelation that U.S. spies are able to monitor communications over Google, Facebook and other American web firms’ platforms will have a big impact overseas, and nowhere more so than in Europe. Read more »
As Facebook’s user base swells larger and larger, data about users is growing much faster, and the social networking giant has developed a faster way to analyze it all with its Presto query engine. Read more »
How does the NSA analyze all the data it’s collecting from cell phone users? With a massive database system built with just such scale and workloads in mind. Read more »
Facebook has been calling on users, external data sources and machine-learning models to improve its Graph Search function. But Facebook must do more to make the tool a widely used utility. Read more »
Synapsify has created an API for taking in textual data and identifying the most relevant pieces, and now it’s building out apps to do the same thing for companies big and small. Read more »
ARM’s future is tied to more devices with computing and connectivity trying to share data on a variety of networks. Call it the internet of things or just the obvious direction we’re heading as society. Read more »
Twitter has signed another global partnership with one of the world’s largest advertising firms, aimed at allowing the company’s clients to target their ads to specific Twitter users based on their behavior on the network. Read more »
A recent study from MIT suggests the likelihood of face-to-face interactions within a city means more productivity. It seems to apply equally to companies and even data, which suggests engineers and architects of all types should take notice. Read more »
Russia’s leading search provider has introduced a new feature that lets webmasters embed interactive functionality – think hotel booking or flight check-ins – directly into their search results listings. Read more »
We talk a lot about the business benefits of big data and only a bit about the privacy implications. A report alleging that Verizon is sharing phone data at the request of the NSA may make privacy a higher priority. Read more »
While visualizations have gotten plenty of attention as options for getting good stuff out of data, In-Q-Tel’s investment in Narrative Science suggests information in paragraphs could work too. Read more »
Heroku has rolled out a new feature to its Postgres database service that lets users write JavaScript functions within the database. The company says this makes it comparable to MongoDB. Read more »
Startup Whistle has designed an activity tracker that clips on to your dog’s collar, but its core offering is a cloud-based analytics service designed to quantify your pet’s health. Read more »
Bill Gates doesn’t invest in tech companies very often. But with ResearchGate, a firm that stands a real chance of improving the workflow of scientists around the world, you can see why he bit. Read more »
CDN startup Fastly has scored a $10 million funding round, so CEO Artur Bergman updates us on its growth and its current architecture. What does it take to keep Fastly fast? Read more »
Just because it’s not a smartphone doesn’t mean it’s dumb. Norway’s Opera is bringing increasingly advanced functionality to its most low-end Mini browser, with version 4.5 boasting a privacy mode and download manager. Read more »
Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai isn’t just logging information about his weight, sleep and activity, he’s sharing the information openly with the hope that other developers will discover interesting ways to use it. Read more »
IBM and 10gen are collaborating on a standard that would make it easier to write applications that can access data from both MongoDB and relational systems such as IBM DB2. Read more »
Google executive Eric Schmidt believes the world needs a platform for data about us in aggregate, even as companies are still trying to decide if they want to expose data externally. Read more »
Social pressure influences everything in our lives from our habits to our clothing choices to the food we eat. It also can be harnessed as a power tool to reduce energy consumption in our homes. Read more »
Electronic medical records company Practice Fusion is taking its first step toward making money from the data generated by its free software system for doctors. Read more »
Cloudera’s new search feature, based on the Apache Solr project, is the latest move by the company to expand the utility of its Hadoop distribution. It’s also far from the last. Read more »
Xyo continues its quest to surface the apps no-one finds by introducing Facebook-derived recommendations. It’s a step beyond the firm’s fine-grained category approach, and one that might develop into a useful predictive tool. Read more »
The proposed new rules would stop carriers from blocking services that compete with their own, but still allow subtler types of discrimination. It would be an improvement, but also allow the creation of a two-speed internet. Read more »
DataSift is bringing the Twitter firehose, Google+ and other social streams to Tableau Software in a new partnership. The deal could help more people gain insight into connections between business and social media. Read more »
Junyo, an education startup led by Zynga co-founder Steve Schoettler, is launching a new product strategy for using data to improve education publishing, and perhaps education itself. Read more »
A group of French researchers believe that the sensors and transmitters we wear will route and relay data, not just collect it. We won’t just be connected to the network. We’ll be the network. Read more »
